Link tags: a11y

Randoma11y - Accessible color combinations

Unusual colour combinations that are also accessible—keep smashing that “New colors” button.

Bruce Lawson’s personal site  : HTML popover, videos and display:blackhole

Bruce raises an interesting question with media playing in popovers—shouldn’t the media pause when the popover is closed? I agree with Bruce that this is a common use case that should be covered declaratively.

What Are Accessibility Overlays? (Webbed Briefs)

All accessibility overlays are bad. Except the ones by overlay vendors planning to sue me. Those ones are good and I highly recommend them, despite what I may say during the video. If someone is asking for an accessibility overlay, either send them here or to overlayfactsheet.com.

Inclusive Design 24 (#id24) 21 September 2023 - YouTube

This free day-long online event all about accessibility and inclusive design is happening right now. You can join live, or catch up on the talks that have already happened, like the excellent talks from Russ Weakly and Manuel Matuzović.

How To Make A Strong Case For Accessibility – Smart Interface Design Patterns

Vitaly provides some sensible rebuttals.

We’re still not innovating with AI-generated UI.

Prototypes and production:

It looks like it will be a great tool for prototyping. A tool to help developers that don’t have experience with CSS and layout to have a starting point. As someone who spent some time building smoke and mirrors prototypes for UX research, I welcome tools like this.

What concerns me is the assertion that this is production-grade code when it simply is not.

Mayerle’s Lithographed International Test Chart, 1907 – Circulating Now from the NLM Historical Collections

An impressive piece of internationlisation and inclusive design.

Just normal web things.

A plea to let users do web things on websites. In other words, stop over-complicating everything with buckets of JavaScript.

Honestly, this isn’t wishlist isn’t asking for much, and it’s a damning indictment of “modern” frontend development that we’ve come to this:

• Let me copy text so I can paste it.
• If something navigates like a link, let me do link things.
• …

New Low in the Accessibility “Industry:” Overlay Company Sues Globally-Recognized Accessibility Expert

Lainey Feingold on the ongoing court proceedings against Adrian Roselli:

This lawsuit against Adrian Roselli impacts every person who cares about including disabled people in the digital world. It impacts all of us who speak, write, and advocate for digital accessibility that is fair, equitable, and ethical.

Accessibility Personas

Personas are often toothless, but these accessibility personas from gov.uk are more practical and useful than most:

Each profile has a different simulation of their persona’s condition and runs the assistive technology they use to help them.

You can use these profiles to experience the web from the perspective of the personas and gain more understanding of accessibility issues.

Designing services for people who need help with numbers

1. About dyscalculia, low numeracy and maths anxiety
2. Round up numbers and remove unnecessary content
3. Leave space around numbers
4. Fill in the information you have
5. Explain what numbers mean
6. Let people make mistakes when entering numbers
7. Research with people who struggle with numbers

Apple previews Live Speech, Personal Voice, and more new accessibility features - Apple

This is the kind of press release I like.

WPDS - Accessibility | Resources

I didn’t know the Washington Post had a design system or that the system has this good section on accessibility.

Accessibility for designer: where do I start? by Stéphanie Walter - UX Researcher & Designer.

Stéphanie has gathered a goldmine of goodies:

Articles, resources, checklists, tools, plugins and books to design accessible products

Designing for colorblindness - The Verge

In design, both in the digital and physical worlds, color should never be the sole indicator of meaning. A simple test: if your work was converted to grayscale, would it still be usable?

Andy describes life online with deuteranopia and dispenses some practical advice for designers:

If there’s any uncertainty, adding labels, icons, or textures to each meaningful color of your design will make it accessible to many more people, regardless of their ability to perceive color.

The search element | scottohara.me

I’ve already add the search element to thesession.org, but while browser support is still rolling out, I’m being extra verbose:

<search role="search">
 ...
</search>

Brought to you by the department of redunancy department.

I’ll remove the ARIA role once browsers are all on board. As Scott says:

Please be aware that this element landing in the HTML spec today does not mean it is available in browsers today. Issues have been filed to implement the search element in the major browsers, including the necessary accessibility mappings. Keep this in mind before you get all super excited and willy nilly add this new element to your pages.

When is :focus-visible visible? | bitsofcode

1. Has the user expressed a preference for always visible focus?
2. Does the focused element support keyboard input?
3. Is the user interacting with the focused element with a non-pointing device?
4. Did a script cause focus to move from a previously visibly-focused element?

The perfect link - The A11Y Collective

How do we write, design, and code a link that works for everyone on every device? Let’s dive into the world of creating the perfect link, without making a pig’s breakfast of it.

The Web Needs a Native .visually-hidden

I agree with the reasoning here—a new display value would be ideal.

Buttons, links, and focus – tempertemper

This is a handy guideline to remember, even if there exceptions:

When a keyboard user follows a link, their focus should be taken to the new place; when a keyboard user presses a button, focus should remain on that button.